Demonstrating Research Impact

Research libraries have engaged in publishing activities in the past, but recently there has been intense growth in the number of library publishing services supporting faculty and students. This book deepens current discussions in the field, and provides decision makers and practitioners with an introduction to the state of the field with an eye towards future prospects.

While citation-based research performance indicators are widely used in the natural and life sciences, quantitative measures for research performance meet strong opposition in the humanities. This volume combines the presentation of state-of-the-art projects on research assessments in the humanities by humanities scholars themselves with a description of the evaluation of humanities research in practice presented by research funders.

Following a brief history of scholarly communication and its measurement -- from traditional peer review to crowdsourced review on the social web - the book will look at the classification of knowledge and academic disciplines, the differences between citations and references, the role of peer review, national research evaluation exercises, the tools used to measure research, the many different types of measurement indicators, and how to measure interdisciplinarity.